Wireless Internet HotspotsPh: 0861-BUTTON

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Wednesday, November 21, 2007

WiFi loses out to 3G/HSDPA? Not Quite.

In a recent article on the popular South African myadsl.co.za website, WiFi loses out to 3G/HSDPA, the author states that "Commercial WiFi hotspots face a dim future in South Africa unless prices are reduced to compete with 3G/HSDPA rates." In this post we comment on this article.

The article is based on research done by World Wide Worx and we believe this research has significant shortcomings. In addition, the article fails to point out the types of users commercial hotspots in hotels may be serving, that is tourists who may only be in a location for a limited time period. When it comes to corporate use of commercial hotspots, it is no doubt correct that South African corporates are increasingly using 3G / HSDPA rather than hotspots, with this use-case however, the cited research is comparing apples with pears.

To discuss the first point, there are now many hotspots available in South Africa that charge very reasonable rates, on a per Megabyte basis. As an example, at a recent hotel where we installed a hotspot we charge 60c per Megabyte on a 4Mbps ADSL connection, with a minimum purchase amount of R30 (i.e. 50MB), no contract, subscriptions, installation or activation fees are required - it's conveniently prepaid and a very good deal. Since billing is on a per Megabyte basis users can surf at their leisure. Also, there is no need to go out and buy an expensive (in the region of R2000 last time we checked) 3G / HSDPA modem or sign a 24 month contract.

About the article failing to point out the types of users hotspots may be targeting, this is an important point. If you are in the country for a limited time period, that is days to months, it is simply much more convenient to use a hotspot. It might not be cheaper if time billing is used, and to give credit where credit is due, the article does correctly point out that a large portion of hotspots in South Africa charge exorbitant rates. RedButton hotspots certainly do not fall into this category. We wrote a case study on the costs of hotspots in South Africa a couple of months ago, naturally the article assumes the user is at a RedButton hotspot.

Our final comment is on the cited research comparing corporate usage of commercial WiFi hotspots with that of 3G / HSDPA. The comparison is irrelevant for the simple reason that each technology serves a different purpose, WiFi is designed for local area networks, 3G is a technology designed for wide area networks. Regardless of pricing it is only natural that South African corporates with sales reps will use 3G because they need to be connected in most conceivable locations, 3G largely fulfills this requirement. When it comes to providing well priced, quality Internet in a local area for temporary overseas visitors, our commercial hotspots do and will continue to beat 3G hands down.

Friday, November 16, 2007

Bend Wireless Internet Any Way You Want It



At RedButton we believe in flexibility and have worked hard to make sure that our solution is just that, flexible. We also believe in making life easier and so have automated features that should be automated.

Our commitment to both aspects, flexibility and automation, is where our Bend Wireless Internet Any Way You Want It mantra stems from. Our ability to deliver on what we believe in comes from over a years worth of investment into research and development. This investment continues unabated today with 40% of our company's resources dedicated to R&D and fostering innovation.

So what's new? Well, in this post we'll be giving examples of how RedButton's flexible hotspot solution gives you the ability to attract and keep customers. We have made it particularly easy to:

  • Run automated promotions – give away any amount of free Internet effortlessly

  • Build your brand – prominent branding on hotspot portal page and vouchers
Since a picture tells a thousand words, lets go straight to the examples. The first is that of an automated promotion with a standard hotspot portal page. The hotspot with the portal page displayed below has been configured to give each user 5 Megabytes worth of Internet free on a daily basis.


With our solution a hotspot can be configured to give away any amount of free Internet on a once-off, daily, weekly or monthly basis. Naturally one can configure the hotspot to give each user unlimited free Internet too. The great thing about giving away only small amount as a promotion is that service levels remain high. With a 5MB promotion for example, a user can have a coffee, check their email and then move on. If they need to use more than their alloted free amount they can purchase prepaid credits using the online credit card or a voucher facility.

The second example is that of a branded hotspot portal page. It differs from the standard RedButton portal page in that it is entirely designed to build the brand of the establishment. The colour scheme, title, logo, end-user charge and set of pictures are all configurable. In addition to the portal page, vouchers can be branded with venue and reseller branding too.


Finally, if you are wondering who the You is in Bend Wireless Internet Any Way You Want It, it's our customers and affiliates. If you are interested in becoming either, don't hesitate to contact us.

Monday, November 5, 2007

RedButton's cutting edge hotspot firmware - making operations a cinch



Hotspot firmware - the software running on wireless routers driving your hotspot - means different things to different people. There are generally three stakeholders: first and foremost there are the end-users who expect and pay for a convenient, reliable service and don't care about what's under the hood. Then there are those who operate the establishment and finally the IT company providing the hotspot service. It is the latter's responsibility to make sure that the expectations of end-users and establishment are met, and that is where RedButton's hotspot firmware comes in.

The decision to develop custom firmware in-house was taken more than half a year ago and our primary motivation to do so was to enhance the reliability of our service. We found that the firmware we have been using until recently, called DD-WRT, was not as reliable as we wanted it to be. DD-WRT v23 (SP1-SP3) suffer from the following serious stability bugs:

  • the embedded captive portal software (chillispot) would randomly crash several times a day, especially at high usage. While DD­-WRT would automatically restart it within 60 seconds this means that anybody who was logged in at the time is thrown off and would have to log in again

  • the kernel (operating system) would randomly crash due to a bug in the driver for the wireless chip causing a reboot of the router a few times a day. Again the frequency of this occuring increases with hotspots usage and results in the same reconnection problems as above, though this time a reinstatement of the service can take 5-10 minutes

  • at low usage locations where none of the above two bugs manifest themselves a memory leak would cause the firmware to run out of memory after a few weeks of uptime causing the captive portal to stop running. Nothing short of a manual power cycle or reboot was required to get the system back to working order

v24 of DD-WRT is hardly any better; while its new wireless driver takes care of at least the second point above it is generally bloated and consumes too much RAM for the captive portal software to run reliably.

Irrespective of that, all versions of DD-WRT (as well as all other firmware out there relying on nvram to store their configuration) deployed on the Linksys WRT54GL suffer from yet another serious bug, this time in the device's bootloader. During power cycles or spikes the firmware resets itself to factory defaults, rendering the router useless until it is manually reconfigured from scratch.

The Firmware that we have specifically adapted and developed for RedButton hotspots has been built with stability in mind and has solved all of the four problems mentioned above. At one of our largest and oldest hotspots we have thus been able to achieve 58 days of uptime since initial upgrade and counting.

In addition to that we have added the following enhancements:
  • User friendly - The web interface of our firmware makes configuration, installation and maintenance of hotspots a breeze:

    • After having flashed our firmware to your WRT54GL configuration is a 3 step process: Set a password, configure your Internet connection and set up your hotspot with minimal effort

    • Advanced tasks such as the setup of additional repeater nodes, multiple SSID's, client mode etc. are possible with just a few clicks

  • Ease of administration - unique and proprietary monitoring and management systems ensure that all routers on the RedButton hotspot network are

    • constantly accessible remotely 24/7 by RedButton technical staff and soon resellers too without requiring complex dynamic dns or other setups. Thus network troubleshooting and customer support is greatly simplified

    • remote system logging which provides a full history of each and every potentially troublesome activity or hardware failure at all hotspots

    • 24/7 monitoring of all network equipment resulting in an early warning system for outages which often kick in before customers call to complain about and report the problem

  • Complete flexibility - thanks to uninterrupted remote access tasks such as firmware or security upgrades, configuration changes and system tuning for all customer premises equipment may be carried out quickly in an automated fashion without requiring very costly and time intensive site visits to each and every hotspot location

  • Semi-automated conversions - converting your existing dd-wrt (v23) Linksys WRT54GL to the RedButton firmware is automated as long as remote ssh access is provided to the device

All of the benefits listed above ensures that the customer not only has constant access to the Internet but also that potential problems can be detected, diagnosed and resolved speedily. To our knowledge no competitor in the hotspot market has a hardware platform with such a low cost/(reliability,flexibility) ratio and nobody in the hotspot business employing the WRT54GL platform has such tight control over each and every wireless router on their network.

Finally, here is a screen-shot of our firmware, version 0.9.10: